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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25428955">bury the dead where they're found</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/mymostimaginaryfriend/pseuds/mymostimaginaryfriend'>mymostimaginaryfriend</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Queen of the South (TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe - Western, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Gen, Inspired by Red Dead Redemption, when i say yee you say haw</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-07-29</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-07-29</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 06:08:05</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,788</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25428955</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/mymostimaginaryfriend/pseuds/mymostimaginaryfriend</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>The age of outlaws is coming to an end but the Vargas gang doesn't plan to go out quietly.</p><p>Wild West AU</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Teresa Mendoza/James Valdez</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>8</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>29</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>bury the dead where they're found</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>So, guess who finished Red Dead Redemption 2 and immediately thought Jeresa AU? Not sure what the interest-level will be for this but since when has that ever stopped me. Giddy up.</p><p>Title from The Only Thing by Sufjan Stevens</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>❖❖❖</p><p>
  <em>Sooner than my fate was wrote</em><br/>
<em>Perfectly it slit my throat</em>
</p><p>❖❖❖</p><p> </p><p>The wind is howling a mournful tune as the three riders pick their way down the desolate mountain pass. It can howl all it wants to; there’s nothing it can tell James that he doesn’t already know. It’s madness being out in this weather but madness is all he has left.</p><p>Madness...and Camila.</p><p>After what happened in Blue Mesa, he’s not so sure they aren’t one and the same.</p><p>Fate forced their hand, Charger had told him wild-eyed and desperate as the gang fled north through the night. But James knows fate is bullshit. Just an excuse used by foolish people to absolve their rash decision-making; justification for letting their good sense get corrupted by revenge and greed.</p><p>They’d always been smarter than that—or at least Camila had.</p><p>Now three of their men are dead, the rest hobbled and hamstrung; their cash box is empty, all of their ill-gotten gains left behind in the chaos of a narrow escape. They’d found shelter but just barely, settling in an old, abandoned mining camp high up in the West Elks. They may have successfully avoided the hangman’s noose for now but have merely traded a quicker death sentence for a slower one.</p><p>No lawman will follow them up here in the unforgiving dead of winter, but death dogs their steps just the same, it’s sharp demands for sacrifice ravenously nipping at their heels. Whether through starvation or stupidity—or both, like Javier’s fool cousin getting lost in the woods hunting for food—the dead will surely add to their ranks before first thaw.</p><p><em>Fate</em>. Camila might have these men believing fate brought them here and only Camila could bring them out but fate will not lift the yoke of guilt from their shoulders nor keep their mouths fed. As much as Camila liked to paint their triumphs and misdeeds as epic destiny, their survival isn’t as simple as fate’s promise kept. Fate will just as surely lead them lock-step to their graves.</p><p>The path narrows and Taza turns in his saddle, his lantern illuminating the grim set of his mouth. Javier curses and spits, turning to James like he’ll see something their best tracker overlooked. James shakes his head; the trail has gone cold.</p><p>“A little longer,” Javier insists and after exchanging a look with James, Taza obliges.</p><p>Boaz could be anywhere by now. Bolted. Back at camp. Bear food. It’d serve him right, too. The notorious hothead had woken up the entire camp that morning arguing with his intended. Even odds he had turned tail and ran just like he always did after a fight with Emilia. Boaz was always running from something. Mostly his responsibilities.</p><p>Maybe he has the right idea.</p><p>James tucks his chin into his collar and peers back up the path into the wind. The snow drifts are high and blowing, blanketing the trail behind them into untouched earth. In a half hour, maybe less, there would be no sign of their tracks. No traces that they were ever here at all.</p><p>
  <em>If I leave now, she’d never find me.</em>
</p><p>The thought sweeps through his mind leaving a clarity as cold as ice in its wake. He could steer off the path under the pretense of picking up Boaz’s trail. Fade into the pines, find the higher ground. Be either frozen to death or out to California by month’s end. Either way, it’d be over. No more grand plans, no more dead ends. No more reasons to stay here, cold, starving and desperate in the name of <em>destiny</em>.</p><p>He’s a better shot than either Javier or Taza but it wouldn’t come to that. Not in this weather. Not when the darkness crooned like a living thing on this frigid, moonless night.</p><p>Besides...they still think he is their friend.</p><p>Shame coils like a serpent around his throat. He’d be nothing without Camila. Dead ten times over by now, maybe worse. And if his companions are not quite his friends they are his brothers in arms. To the degree he’s still able to care about anything, he cares about that.</p><p>The thought has him gripping his reins too tightly, his horse Nyx offering a quick reprimand with an offended toss of her mane. She knickers irritably, as though she can hear all the traitorous thoughts traipsing through his head. Knowing her, she probably can.</p><p>“Are you sure Boaz wants to be found?”</p><p>“He’d never leave Emilia,” Javier insists and James knows enough to keep his opinion on that to himself. It isn’t Boaz who hardly leaves the pretty widow’s side, but Javier has always idolized people he shouldn’t, a habit that leaves him speaking wishful thinking into truths, like it isn’t a lie just the same.</p><p>“There’s a mule track here,” Taza calls back, lantern held aloft, it’s dim glow swathing a nearly imperceptible hiccup in the tree line. “Fresher prints.”</p><p>Javier spurs his horse off the trail, hellbent and headfirst, already holding onto this new hope with both hands. James reluctantly follows behind, surrendering the last chance of making it back to camp before the stew pot is scraped dry. The track winds steeply up through the pines, meeting and receding from the rock face in a meandering dance. The path is snow covered and overgrown but less hidden by the yard. Taza is right—broken branches, trampled underbrush. Signs of a posse bottlenecked where the path jackknifes up into a tight ravine. Someone came through here recently and in a hurry. A lot of someones.</p><p>“Smoke!” Javier’s voice rises above the wind, echoing off the rock wall looming high on either side of the track.</p><p>“Could be from miles away,” James cautions but Javier fidgets in his saddle, like he’s itching for open ground. Nyx snorts her agreement but James keeps a firm hand on the reins. It hasn’t escaped him that they’re pinned in like this, slabs of rock forcing them single-file, lanterns lighting them up for all to see. It’d be the perfect place for an ambush. How many dead men had walked these steps? Lured to their deaths by the same signal fire?</p><p>They are almost to the top of the ridgeline when Taza frowns, holding up his fist. James is already reaching for the rifle on his back. He hears it too. The bone-chilling wail singing through his blood like a siren’s call.</p><p>Wolves maybe.</p><p>Taza looks back at them, eyes wide just as Javier asks, aghast, “Is that—?”</p><p>James gives Nyx her head and she takes off like a shot up the ridge onto the bluff.</p><p>Someone is screaming.</p><p> </p><p>❖❖❖</p><p> </p><p>At this moment, Teresa Mendoza is only certain of two things.</p><p>One: Guero is dead. She heard the shot herself—heard the unmistakable sickening thump of his body hitting the planks above her head. She heard their <em>laughter</em>.</p><p>Two: She’ll surely be next if she can't get these cellar doors open and escape to the yard.</p><p>Her chances may be no better out there—barefoot and running in the snow—but she’d rather present a moving target than be pinned down in here, a fish in a barrel. An instinct old as time tells her to be captured by these men would be a fate worse than death. She’ll take her chances in the cold.</p><p>She backs toward the exit, her eyes pinned on the ceiling trap door, Guero’s six-shooter gripped tightly enough in her palm to stamp the carved insignia on the pearl grip into her skin. If any such brand offered protection once, it offers it no more, all the power of Guero’s name bleeding out with him onto the hardwood floor upstairs.</p><p>She is alone now, facing down death in her nightgown and the only help Guero has left to give are the six bullets chambered in his gun.</p><p>“<em>Show me how to use this</em>,” Teresa had playfully demanded, back when all of this had seemed one big romantic adventure. Back when the cold metal of a revolver had thrilled her more than it had scared her.</p><p>She only feels fear now.</p><p>Fear she’ll run out of bullets when Guero’s murderers think to check the cellar. Fear that she’ll be better off saving one of those bullets for herself.</p><p>She knows what Epifanio’s men will do to her if they find her. If he is willing to kill his beloved godson, he won’t hesitate ripping her apart piece by piece to see what bloody secrets she holds inside. Secrets Guero must have believed were worth dying over. Secrets he never trusted her enough to possess.</p><p>Their departure from Amarillo had been a hurried one but Teresa didn’t mind the abrupt change of scenery. She had never managed to stay in one place long enough to grow roots and she’d gladly follow Guero anywhere he wanted to go. There hadn’t been much happiness in her life before him. Meeting Guero had seemed like a beam of sunlight, bursting through heavy clouds. Heaven-sent.</p><p>And truth be told, he hadn’t seemed nervous as he hastily packed up their belongings. He’d seemed exhilarated. “You, me. Paradise. This is it, darlin’. We just have to make a few stops first.”</p><p>So she had stifled her questions about why one of those stops was an isolated mountain cabin in the middle of winter and she pretended not to notice when an errant storm shutter banging in the wind had Guero scrambling for his revolver. <em>Once a gunslinger, always a gunslinger</em>, she supposed. And after three uneventful weeks, she thought nothing of it when Guero preferred to warm their bed rather than stay up and keep watch.</p><p>“A little longer,” he had promised in the afterglow, lips pressed to her temple under their quilt as the winter wind rattled the windows. “You’ll see.”</p><p>He barely had enough time to shove his gunbelt and rucksack into her arms, close the trap door and roll the rug back into place before the front door was kicked down by Epifanio’s men.</p><p>And then Guero took his secrets to the grave.</p><p>She can hear his killers upstairs ransacking the cabin and loft. It won’t be long now until they find the trap door. She wonders if they’ve already found the horses in the barn. She’ll need one if she has any real chance at escape.</p><p>“Come out, come out little girl. We know you’re here, morra.”</p><p>She slings the gunbelt and rucksack criss-cross over her torso, keeping one eye on the ceiling as she strains all her weight against the heavy cellar doors leading up and out to the yard. The storm doors barely move an inch but it’s enough to hear the metallic clank of the chains and padlock keeping them in place. She’s not sure whether she has Guero or circumstance to thank for that but it has the sob she’s been stifling surfacing into her throat.</p><p>She grits her teeth and pushes with all of her might, working the barrel of the Colt through the crack in the door. She can shoot the chain or the lock, if she’s lucky, never mind that Teresa has never had much luck. Apparently, fate agrees because upstairs, a raucous cry is followed by shattering glass and the tell-tale woosh of flames igniting.</p><p>At first she thinks they mean to smoke her out of hiding, but then she hears it again. The laughter. Maybe they already found what they came for. Maybe they didn’t care. Maybe they had decided the only thing of value she had left to offer them is the entertainment of her horrible demise.</p><p>Either way, the kerosene catches quickly and the time for stealth is over. She pounds on the cellar doors and screams as loud as she can. She screams until her throat is raw, claws until her fingernails break and bleed. Empties the cylinders one shot after another. But still the doors hold.</p><p>Through the heat and smoke and her frenzy to be free, she doesn’t notice when the jeers and shouts turn frantic, nor how the echoes of shots ringing out in the open night air stop mirroring her own rhythm on the trigger.</p><p>It’s only a rifle blast splintering open the storm doors mere inches from her head that sends her scrambling back into the smoke.</p><p>With a thunk and a mighty groan the doors are heaved open and the chains fall to the snow. She doesn’t recognize the man who steps in from the night but the flames reflected in his obsidian eyes make him look like the Devil himself.</p><p>She steps from the shadows, six-shooter already aimed squarely at his forehead but the man makes no move to raise his rifle, no move at all save a widening of his eyes at the gun.</p><p>She doesn’t think twice before pulling the trigger.</p><p> </p><p>❖❖❖</p><p> </p><p>Death has been a shadow walking one step behind James his entire life. He’s known for a while that there’s more days behind him than ahead but in the rare moments he allows himself to ponder the method of his demise, the most likely scenarios have always been a drunkard’s knife, a hangman’s noose, or a rival gang’s bullet.</p><p>None of the rare morbid imaginings ever included an actual Angel of Death.</p><p>He catches a glimpse through the smoke of bare feet beneath a sooty white nightgown, unbound dark curls wild in disarray around furious eyes and then he’s staring down the barrel of a revolver he’s only encountered in ghost stories: Guero Davila’s <em>el Hado</em>.</p><p>He can almost hear the sound of Camila’s husky laugh—<em>do you believe in fate now?</em>— as the vengeful spirit before him pulls the trigger.</p><p>The gun makes a hollow click, followed quickly by another, then another.</p><p>The third empty chamber spurs him into motion and he reaches out to tip the gun barrel aside, no longer content to passively participate in this game of Russian Roulette.</p><p>The woman stares at the weapon like it has betrayed her, loosening her grip and letting it tumble to the ground. James is struck for a moment by the sight of an object of such legend laying discarded in the dirt. So easily rendered worthless.</p><p>The heat is rolling out of the cellar in oppressive waves. It won’t be long until the ceiling collapses. He reaches out. “Miss—”</p><p>But she hasn’t thrown the gun down in surrender. She merely needed both hands free for her attack. She launches herself at him like a wildcat, with a strength born out of desperation, scratching at his face with nails jagged and sharp.</p><p>He grabs her wrists and wrenches them down, but not before his eyes snag on fingertips that have been ripped bloody and raw. This woman has tried to claw through a door barehanded. To her, he is yet one more obstacle standing in the way of freedom. It gentles his voice if not his grip.</p><p>“Listen to me,” he says, pinning her hands between them and using her stiff arms as leverage to haul her back up with him into the fresh air. “We’re not gonna hurt you.”</p><p>His words don’t penetrate. She continues to struggle, staring past him to the chaos of the yard. Taza has freed the horses from the burning barn and they’re running roughshod through what’s left of Epifanio’s men. Javier is doing his best at picking off the rest as they beat a hasty retreat.</p><p>He gives her a shake. “Is there anyone else inside?”</p><p>She looks at him then, the devastation in her eyes bottomless. “No.”</p><p>“James!” Javier yells out a warning and James lets her go, turning around and unholstering his pistol in one smooth motion, shooting and killing one of Epi’s men who had crept up behind him, knife drawn.</p><p>The woman stares at the man on the ground then back at James, a wary sort of acceptance filtering over her face.</p><p>“We’re bad men,” he agrees. “But we ain’t them.”</p><p>It occurs to James that he’s pulling her out of one fire straight into another, but the die has been cast. He lets the fatalistic serenity settle over his shoulders like a warm cloak and whistles for Nyx. He doesn’t know what has brought this woman here or what twist of fate placed her in Epifanio's cross hairs, but he knows Camila will certainly be interested to find out.</p><p>He holds out his hand. “We got a camp a few miles back. Food and shelter.”</p><p>She takes one last look at the burning cabin and allows him to lift her up onto the saddle. He swings up behind her and grabs the reins.</p><p>“Taza! Javier!” he calls. “Get the horses. Let’s ride.”</p><p> </p><p>❖❖❖</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Yeehaw? Thanks for reading! I hope to continue this but just in case I never do I'll post it as a one-shot for now.  It's been so long since I posted anything that I wanted to share something in a thank you to all the lovely people who have been leaving me kudos &amp; comments these last few months in these exhausting times.  I cherish each one! THANK YOU.  Let me know if you'd like to see more!</p><p>Some notes:</p><p>(1) <i> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuScMNguZnw">We're bad men.  But we ain't them.</a></i> is a line direct from the game.</p><p>(2) <i><a href="https://youtu.be/NXT4YJekeXc">Sooner than my fate was wrote / Perfectly it slit my throat</a></i> is a lyric from February Seven by the Avett Brothers.</p><p>(3) Randomly picked the West Elks for a setting of this chapter and welp - <a href="https://www.pikespeakphoto.com/aerials/a_images/elk/05.jpg">check out the mountain name second from the left!</a></p></blockquote></div></div>
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